Google has updated its list of fans activated by Google users to reflect the Google Notebook name change. Users who have hard-coded the old robots.txt user agent or for other reasons have a grace period of a few weeks before the old agent stops working in August 2026.
Reasons to Block Gemini Notebook
Gemini Notebook’s Discover Sources feature will steal online articles without the site owner’s permission. This feature extracts up to ten sources for a defined query or user topic, provides an AI summary, and does not generate referrals.
Gemini Notebook’s audio and video overview captures the intent of online content and turns it into an audio podcast or video explainer. This output, if used online, may compete with the use of the original source.
All of these methods of using online content to generate other types of content are intended functions of Gemini Notebook. It automates the process of scraping and creating something else from different online content without attribution to the original source.
Site owners who want to block Gemini Notebook will need to update their shortcuts and .htaccess files to continue working.
NotebookLM Is Now A Gemini Notebook
NotebookLM has been renamed to Gemini Notebook. Gemini Notebook is the same thing. There is no change in how it works or what it does.
Gemini Notebook is a research assistant that allows users to upload documents that can serve as ground truth and enable better answers, research, and learning using uploaded materials. The Gemini Notebook is multimodal, meaning it can work with YouTube and upload audio files.
The multimodality of the Gemini Notebook also works in the other direction. It can turn uploaded documents into an audio or video podcast episode, which can be useful for learning about a topic.
Why Gemini Notebook User Agent is Important
The logical part for SEOs and website owners is that Gemini Notebook can download web pages and use them for user research. This works by having the user paste in URLs or by using the Discover Sources feature, which can automate the process of finding articles and web pages to be added as research sources.
The scrapers or crawlers used by Gemini Notebook are classified as user-activated followers, and because they are initiated by users, they do not comply with robots.txt.
However, the site owner can set up a firewall rule to block user-activated followers or create a .htaccess rule to do the same.
Here’s an example of how to do it:
RewriteEngine On
# Block Google-GeminiNotebook
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Google-GeminiNotebook [NC]
RewriteRule ^ - [F,L]
Project Mariner Completely Disappears
Project Mariner was retired in May 2026 and Google’s documentation was updated to reflect that.
Older documents used to read like this:
“Related products Google-Agent is used by agents hosted on Google’s infrastructure to navigate the web and perform actions at a user’s request (for example, Project Mariner). It uses the IP range from user-triggered-agents.json.”
The above section of the user-activated download documentation is the same except for the removal of this part: (for example, Project Mariner).
Mention of Notebook LM Removed
Another consequential change is the complete removal of Google NotebookLM from documents.
This is removed:
“Google NotebookLM
The user agent over HTTP requests Google-NotebookLM
Related products The Google-NotebookLM fan requests URLs that other NotebookLM users have provided as sources for their projects.”
The deleted section has been replaced with new documents showing the name change in Gemini Notebook.
These are the new documents:
“Gemini Notebook
The user agent in HTTP requests the mobile agent
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 10; K) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/138.0.0.0 Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Google-GeminiNotebook; +https://developers.google.com/crawling/docs/crawlers-fetchers/google-geminibook)
Desktop agentMozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/137.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 (compatible; Google-GeminiNotebook; +https://developers.google.com/crawling/docs/crawlers-getchernotebook/
Front agent (supported until August 2026) Google-NotebookLM
Related products The Gemini Notebook download requests URLs that other Gemini Notebook users have provided as sources for their projects.”
As mentioned earlier, the Google-NotebookLM user agent will continue to operate until August 2026.
The changelog explains:
“If you’ve hardcoded the old value into your code, update the string to avoid potential bugs. We’ll continue to support the old value to allow for a smooth transition.”
The taker
Google’s redesign of NotebookLM to Gemini Notebook is accompanied by an update to its documentation. The new documentation removes the old user agent (Google-NotebookLM) and replaces it with documentation specific to the new user (Google-GeminiNotebook).
Site owners using the old user agent to track or block Gemini Notebook’s browser and download functionality only have a few weeks to update their firewalls or .htaccess files.
User configured followers still do not listen to robots.txt. Robots.txt is not a directive. An order is something that a search engine must listen to. So there is no need for the Gemini Notebook browser to comply. But site owners can still control access to content using a firewall or .htaccess file.
Featured image by Shutterstock/Drawlab19
